The primary goal of the following essay is to examine a concept of learned helplessness associated with stress. In the video, the speaker demonstrates the concept of learned helplessness in practice. In particular, Dr. Charisse Nixon divided the class into two groups and gave each group a small and easy assignment. All of the students were told that the task was the same for everyone; however, only one part of the class was able to solve it faster than the other one. In the reality, the first part of the class was actually given an easy task and the other one was given the unsolvable one. This example greatly shows that people are very vulnerable to their own emotions and helplessness. Due to the fact that the students felt stupid, underestimated and frustrated, they were not able to solve the last task, which was the same for everybody. Thus, they induced a concept of learned helplessness.
The phenomenon as itself is real because it can affect any person both in social and academic life. I learned from the video that learned helplessness happens in real life frequently, for example if a person has always been bullied and rejected by others, it is most probably that this individual will not be able to stand up and have friends because of being scared and unconfident.
One of my friends had a situation when she had to do a class project and present it in a class. She was looking for teammates but nobody agreed to work with her. It was a group project so she did not have a group. Clearly, she eventually felt unconfident and helpless because nobody from the class wanted to cooperate with her. In this case, I think the best way to avoid learned helplessness is to realize that the problem was not her character or personality, but simply her classmates were too lazy to do a project and did not have any spare time for it.
Reference:
Nixon, C. (2008). Learned Helplessness - Dr. Charisse Nixon. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6TONVkJ3eI
